06.27.06
Google to release competitor to PayPal this week
I heard about this in the past that Google was working on a competitor to PayPal, now officially called GBuy. A news article on msnbc released the story today. Naturally there will be an API for GBuy, much like there is an API for Google Sitemaps and Google’s Conversion Snippet, which tracks the keywords that visitors to your site clicked on when they left Google.com to visit your site. If you take a look at Google’s growing list of tools, it is pretty impressive.
Paypal, which really started as an escrow broker for Ebay auctions, quickly grew in popularity and was eventually bought by Ebay, but initially it was no replacement for good old-fasioned merchant accounts and payment gateways. That changed just recently, as Ebay released an API which allows for seamlessly linke TO AND FROM a shopping cart to paypal to compelte a credit card transaction - even for those that do not have a payment gateway. And the transaction fee? You would expect something like 4%, which historically was not out of line for ecommerce credit card transact, but no - its 2.3% - right in line with entry-level rates for new online merchant accounts. This has to be driving merchant account and payment gateway companies nuts, because it is now possible to bypass all of that headache when setting up a new ecommerce site. At Delaware.Net, we are implementing the PayPal seamless link API right now so that customers can take advatage of this new feature that Paypal is offering.
It wil be interesting to see if Google has similar plans for GBuy and it if it will offer the same features.
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